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CRS Report for Congress entailing issues and legislative action in regards to K-12 teacher quality. Topics include, unionization, funding, tenure, etc..

In the 107th Congress, the most prominent air quality issue has been whether state and federal regulations designed to protect air quality are having a negative impact on energy production, and, if so, whether legislation should be enacted to reform such regulations. The early discussion focused primarily on California, but with the release of the Administration’s energy policy recommendations in May 2001 and subsequent congressional action, attention shifted to issues more national in scope.

Key water quality issues that may face the 107th Congress include: actions to implement existing provisions of the Clean Water Act (CWA), whether additional steps are necessary to achieve overall goals of the Act, and the appropriate federal role in guiding and paying for clean water activities. Legislative prospects for comprehensively amending the Act have for some time stalled over whether and exactly how to change the law. If clean water issues receive attention in the 107th Congress, consideration of specific issues will depend in part on the CWA policy agenda of the new Bush Administration and on priorities of the key committees that have major jurisdiction over the Act.

This issue brief views reorganization and management as involving the alteration of the program administrative structure and operations of the executive branch for reasons of efficiency, economy, and direction. The underlying issue is who reorganizes or sets management policy—Congress or the President— and by what authority and, also, for what purpose?

This report discusses about a presidential charter, A model and principles for success, Implications for the homeland security office, Administrative Developments and legislation.

Key auditing and accounting reform legislation, S. 2673 (Sarbanes), and H.R. 3763 (Oxley), and proposals for auditor oversight by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have been launched to help restore public confidence in a system of corporate financial accounting tainted by accounting fiascos at companies like Enron, Tyco, and Worldcom. This report provides background on significant current SEC regulatory powers in the area of accounting and auditing. It will be updated if there are changes in SEC authority.

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Appropriations are one part of a complex federal budget process that includes budget resolutions, appropriations (regular, supplemental, and continuing) bills, rescissions, and budget reconciliation bills. This report is a guide to one of the 13 regular appropriations bills that Congress considers each year. It is designed to supplement the information provided by the House and Senate Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittees.

The September 11 terrorist attacks and continued threats of future attacks have directed Congress’s attention to U.S.-Canada border security-related issues. Both countries are striving to balance adequate border security with other issues such as the facilitation of legitimate cross-border travel and commerce, and protecting civil liberties. Congress has taken action (the USA PATRIOT Act, P.L. 107-56; and the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002, P.L. 107-173) to increase the number of INS border patrol agents and inspectors at northern ports of entry and to provide these officials with additional technologically upgraded equipment.

The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 (NWPA) calls for disposal of spent nuclear fuel in a deep geologic repository that is unlikely to be disturbed for thousands of years. Low-level waste sites are a state responsibility under the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Act of 1980. Pursuant to that act, 10 regional compacts for disposal of low level waste have been approved by Congress. Three commercial low-level waste sites are currently operating, in the states of South Carolina, Utah, and Washington.

The House passed a bill (H.R. 3146) on September 24 to extend TAIF, mandatory child care, abstinence education, and transitional Medicaid, on current terms, through March 31, 2004. In the absence of legislation, these programs would expire on September 30. The Senate Finance Committee approved a comprehensive TAIF preauthorization proposal of Chairman Chuck Grassley on September 10. Entitled Personal Responsibility and Individual Development for Everyone (PRIDE), the legislation would extend TANF, mandatory child care, abstinence education, and transitional Medicaid for 5 years, FY2004 through FY2008. It would raise TANF work participation standards, increase weekly work hours, add new countable work activities,

This report examines recent research findings about Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) implementation as it has affected the nation’s child welfare system. The nation’s program of cash aid for needy families with children (TANF) and its program to protect and care for children who are abused or neglected (child welfare services) are linked by history and share some of the same clients who have similar service needs.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 created the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grants to states, which emphasizes work and responsibility over dependence on government benefits. GAO found that impairments are common among TANF recipients and their children, with 44 percent of TANF recipients reporting that they or their children had impairments, compared with 15 percent of the non-TANF population. Moreover, recipients with impairments were more likely to be white and over age 35 than those without impairments. GAO found that people with impairments who left TANF were less likely to be employed than leavers without impairments, but many leavers with impairments received Supplemental Security Income, a federal program providing cash assistance to low-income individuals who are aged, blind, or disabled."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) submits an annual congressional justification for the funds and number of staff positions requested. For fiscal year 2002, IRS asked for $9.4 billion and 101,000 full-time-equivalent (FTE) staff positions. Congress expressed concerns about the information in IRS's justification and asserted that other types of information and presentations would better help Congress evaluate IRS's budget. In the context of Department of the Treasury and Office of Management and Budget guidance, IRS has the flexibility to present more information than it included in the fiscal year 2002 justification and to display it in different ways. Congressional Justifications typically vary in form and content, reflecting the ongoing relationship between each agency and appropriations subcommittee. The main purpose of Congressional Justifications is to give the subcommittees more details about agency programs and their relationship to appropriation requests than the President's budget documents provide. IRS's fiscal year 2002 justification had a summary section and a section on each of IRS's five appropriations. The summary section explained the foundation of IRS's budget request and summarized the dollars and FTE staff positions being requested for specific appropriations."

This report is a collection of summary articles on FY 2000 studies of slurry transport and salt-well pumping related to Hanford tank waste transfers. These studies are concerned with the stability (steady, uninterrupted flow) of tank waste transfers, a subset of the Department of Energy (DOE) Tanks Focus Area Tank (TFA) Waste Chemistry effort. This work is a collaborative effort of AEA Technology plc, the Diagnostic Instrumentation and Analysis Laboratory at Mississippi State University (DIAL-MSU), the Hemispheric Center for Environmental Technology at Florida International University (HCET-FIU), Numatec Hanford Corporation (NHC), and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The purpose of this report is to provide, in a single document, an overview of these studies to help the reader identify contacts and resources for obtaining more detailed information and to help promote useful interchanges between researchers and users. Despite over 50 years of experience in transporting radioactive tank wastes to and from equipment and tanks at the Department of Energy's Hanford, Savannah River, and Oak Ridge sites, waste slurry transfer pipelines and process piping become plugged on occasion. At Hanford, several tank farm pipelines are no longer in service because of plugs. At Savannah River, solid deposits in the outlet line …

The Neutral Particle Analyzer (NPA) diagnostic on the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) utilizes a PPPL-designed E||B spectrometer which measures the energy spectra of minority H and bulk D species simultaneously with 39 energy channels per mass specie and a time resolution of 1 msec. The calibrated energy range is E = 0.5-150 keV and the energy resolution varies from (delta)E/E = 3-7% over the surface of the microchannel plate detector. The NPA measures thermal Maxwellian ion spectra to obtain line integrated ion temperatures, T{sub i}. For line integral electron densities below neL {approx} 3.5 x 10{sup 19} m{sup -2}, good agreement is observed between the line integrated NPA T{sub i} and the central T{sub i}(0) measured by the spatially localized CHarge Exchange Recombination Spectroscopy (CHERS) diagnostic. However, with increasingly higher n{sub eL} the NPA T{sub i} falls below the central T{sub i}(0) measured by CHERS because the charge exchange neutral emissivity weights the line integrated NPA measurement outboard of the plasma core. An analytic neutral analysis code, DOUBLE, has been applied to the NPA data to correct for this effect and restore agreement with T{sub i}(0) measured by CHERS. A description of the NPA diagnostic on NSTX and initial …

A generation of high performance front-end and read-out ASICs customized for highly segmented CdZnTe sensors is presented. The ASICs, developed in a multi-year effort at Brookhaven National Laboratory, are targeted to a wide range of applications including medical, safeguards/security, industrial, research, and spectroscopy. The front-end multichannel ASICs provide high accuracy low noise preamplification and filtering of signals, with versions for small and large area CdZnTe elements. They implement a high order unipolar or bipolar shaper, an innovative low noise continuous reset system with self-adapting capability to the wide range of detector leakage currents, a new system for stabilizing the output baseline and high output driving capability. The general-purpose versions include programmable gain and peaking time. The read-out multichannel ASICs provide fully data driven high accuracy amplitude and time measurements, multiplexing and time domain derandomization of the shaped pulses. They implement a fast arbitration scheme and an array of innovative two-phase offset-free rail-to-rail analog peak detectors for buffering and absorption of input rate fluctuations, thus greatly relaxing the rate requirement on the external ADC. Pulse amplitude, hit timing, pulse risetime, and channel address per processed pulse are available at the output in correspondence of an external readout request. Prototype chips have …

We present recent simulation results for the main features of the electron cloud in the storage ring of the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at Oak Ridge, and updated results for the Proton Storage Ring (PSR) at Los Alamos. In particular, a complete refined model for the secondary emission process including the so called true secondary, rediffused and backscattered electrons has been included in the simulation code.

This report describes work accomplished in the project, titled ''Development of Appropriate Resistance Spot Welding Practice for Transformation-Hardened Steels.'' The Phase 1 of the program involved development of in-situ temper diagrams for two gauges of representative dual-phase and martensitic grades of steels. The results showed that tempering is an effective way of reducing hold-time sensitivity (HTS) in hardenable high-strength sheet steels. In Phase 2, post-weld cooling rate techniques, incorporating tempering, were evaluated to reduce HTS for the same four steels. Three alternative methods, viz., post-heating, downsloping, and spike tempering, for HTS reduction were investigated. Downsloping was selected for detailed additional study, as it appeared to be the most promising of the cooling rate control methods. The downsloping maps for each of the candidate steels were used to locate the conditions necessary for the peak response. Three specific downslope conditions (at a fix ed final current for each material, timed for a zero-, medium-, and full-softening response) were chosen for further metallurgical and mechanical testing. Representative samples, were inspected metallographically, examining both local hardness variations and microstructures. The resulting downslope diagrams were found to consist largely of a C-curve. The softening observed in these curves, however, was not supported by subsequent …

Using ASCA data, we find, contrary to other researchers using ROSAT data, that the X-ray spectra of the VY Scl stars TT Ari and KR Aur are poorly fit by an absorbed blackbody model but are well fit by an absorbed thermal plasma model. The different conclusions about the nature of the X-ray spectrum of KR Aur may be due to differences in the accretion rate, since this Star was in a high optical state during the ROSAT observation, but in an intermediate optical state during the ASCA observation. TT Ari, on the other hand, was in a high optical state during both observations, so directly contradicts the hypothesis that the X-ray spectra of VY Sol stars in their high optical states are blackbodies. Instead, based on theoretical expectations and the ASCA, Chandra, and XMM spectra of other nonmagnetic cataclysmic variables, we believe that the X-ray spectra of VY Sol stars in their low and high optical states are due to hot thermal plasma in the boundary layer between the accretion disk and the surface of the white dwarf, and appeal to the acquisition of Chandra and XMM grating spectra to test this prediction.

Spectrometer grade, room-temperature radiation detectors have been produced on Cd{sub 0.90}Zn{sub 0.10}Te grown by the low-pressure Bridgman technique. Small amount of indium has been used to compensate the uncompensated Cd vacancies for the crystals to be semi-insulating. The properties of the detectors are critically dependent on the amount of excess Te introduced into the growth melts of the Cd{sub 0.90}Zn{sub 0.10}Te crystals and the best detectors are fabricated from crystals grown with 1.5% excess Te. Detector resolution of {sup 57}Co and {sup 241}Am radiation peaks are observed on all detectors except the ones produced on Cd{sub 0.90}Zn{sub 0.10}Te grown from the melt in the stoichiometric condition. The lack of resolution of these stoichiometric grown detectors is explained by a p/n conduction-type inhomogeneity model.